It shouldn't be taxing to make fairness work

George Osborne stood before his party and said he was thinking about the low-paid working class. Like most politicians, he wasn’t thinking about them too hard, though, was he?

‘Where is the fairness,’ he asked the Conservative Party conference last month, ‘in the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of his next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’

Where is the fairness, it might equally be asked, in that red-eyed shift-worker being taxed on the £12,070 minimum wage he may earn annually? This is the least you need to live, the Government insists. Now where’s our 20 per cent?

The living wage: Ed Miliband has spoke of raising the minimum wage to £7.45 per hour this week

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, spoke of raising the minimum wage to £7.45 per hour this week — he called it the living wage. But that does not solve the problem if the Government still takes its cut.

If you want to raise standards for the lowest paid, raise the basic personal tax allowance until it is in line with the minimum wage. If Osborne considers a life on benefits too lucrative, should he not provide more incentives to work?

The job market is unforgivably daunting to those starting out. We live in a world of unpaid internships and voluntary positions, with the prospect of a living wage somewhere down the line; a world in which the value of a university education has fallen 22 per cent in ten years.

The numbers game: If Osborne can't make fairness work, then he shouldn't be in the job

My starting salary on a national newspaper in 1984 was £18,000. Some who reach Fleet Street through graduate trainee programmes receive no more than that now. Repayments for student loans do not even start at these entry-level salaries.

This week, Unite, the union whose parliamentary branch represents those who work for MPs, exposed the contradiction in rhetoric and reality.

Far from buying into the living-wage concept, 181 out of 650 MPs fail to pay their staff at Miliband’s most basic hourly rate. And if they were all Tories, you can guarantee Unite would have publicised its findings. So this is the truth of the modern job market: underpaid, exploited, but still taxed.

The politicos pontificate, but what do they do to help? Even if the current £6.19 hourly basic leapt by £1.26 to Miliband’s national living-wage level, tax and national insurance contributions would make the advantage largely meaningless. As for Gordon Brown’s tax credits system — the taxman takes the money, but then gives some back! Ridding the country of the bureaucracy alone would be a step towards greater financial literacy.

Of course, raising the basic personal tax allowance would also benefit the well-off, but there are ways to claw that back higher up the scale. Chancellors are supposed to be good with numbers. If Osborne can’t make fairness work, then he shouldn’t be in the job.

So what about the social contract? Shouldn’t we all pay tax? What about the idea that we all, in some way, must contribute our share?

All very noble; all very baseless. The poor do pay their share. They pay road tax, VAT, fuel tax (at 81p per litre, like the rest of us), and tax on every can of beer or packet of fags.

True, a teetotal, cycling, non-smoking nudist who utilises only rummaged second-hand furniture carried to his door by unpaid well-wishers might escape tax altogether, but give him a break. He’s still only earning 12 grand a year — and freezing his cobblers off.

Andrew Rosenfeld returned from five years' tax exile in Switzerland to widen the base of supporters and win key marginal seats for Labour

Andrew Rosenfeld is the Labour Party donor responsible for widening the base of supporters and winning key marginal seats at the next election. He has even returned from five years’ tax exile in Switzerland to do so, which was nice of him.

Rosenfeld is now embroiled in something of an unseemly row over his new house in Highgate, North London. He bought it for £8.5 million but doesn’t really like it, so wants to level the property and start again.

So that he has somewhere to live while the work is done, he bought the house next door, too, for £6.2 million.

It is easy to see why Rosenfeld was Ed’s go-to guy when it came to appealing beyond the traditional Labour vote. The party must register quite poorly with Swiss tax exiles and those who would use a £6 million home in one of the capital’s smartest roads as a glorified caravan.

Perhaps Andrew has a state school education he would like to share with us to massage his image, Miliband-style. Ooh, I bet it was tough.

Nadine’s just like a bad Currie

We need MPs such as Nadine Dorries, I read in this newspaper the other day. No, sorry, we don’t. We don’t need Dorries, we didn’t need Louise Mensch, and we certainly didn’t need Edwina Currie.

One of the tragedies of today’s Tory Party is that the desperation to compete with Labour and be seen as appealing to women leads it to give a platform to the worst kind of self-publicists, who see politics as just one strand of a wider media career.

In a truly gender-equal world, these mediocre personalities would be relegated to the margins.